The “Mental Comintern” and the
Self-Destructive Tactics of CPUSA, 1945-1958

The Communist Movement, 1944-1956

Institute of NationalRemembrance, Poland

28 September 2007

By John Earl Haynes

The
Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) emerged from World War II with significant
institutional strength.Its membership
exceeded 60,000 and largely consisted of native-born citizens, unlike the
prewar party that had a large noncitizen immigrant membership.CPUSA had achieved a base in the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), the second largest of America’s two trade union
federations, with Communists leading unions with a quarter of CIO’s
membership.Communists achieved a
significant role as part of the New Deal political coalition’s left-wing and
were influential in mainstream politics in the states of New
York, California, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington.

By
1958 all had changed.Membership had
collapsed to about 3,000, and Communists had been expelled from the CIO.CPUSA had become a political pariah and
retained no influence in the Democratic Party, the nation’s dominant political
party.Traditionally, the collapse has
been attributed to government persecution and public anti-Communist sentiment
brought on by the Cold War.And, indeed,
both factors played a role.Less
appreciated is the extent to which the CPUSA contributed to its own collapse by
making disastrous political choices based on a misunderstanding of what Moscow wanted.

The Comintern Era

In
1919, radicals inspired by the Bolshevik revolution founded two new parties,
the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party.Both parties proclaimed their adherence to
the newly organized Communist International (Comintern) and sent emissaries to Moscow seeking Comintern
recognition.The differences between the
two were chiefly over leadership and organization issues, not ideology, and in Moscow the two parties
competed by each proclaiming itself to be more loyal to the Comintern than the
other and modeling itself more closely on the Bolshevik party than the
other.This pattern of deference to Moscow’s leadership and
example only became stronger over time.

Comintern
demanded and achieved merger of the two competing parties.Numerous Comintern representatives journeyed
to the United States
in the 1920s to arbitrate factional fights in the American party, supervise
party conventions, and oversee the work of selected party organizations and
affiliates.More than once Comintern
representative simply by fiat imposed a Comintern selected leadership slate on
the fractious American party.Similarly,
the Comintern also imposed its will on organization and ideological
matters.For example, in1924 the Comintern imposed a drastic change
in the American party’s tactical stance in the 1924 American presidential
election, and in 1925 the American party, at Comintern insistence, adopted a
“Bolshevization” plan that eliminated the semi-autonomy of its foreign-language
ethnic/immigrant affiliates.American
Communists wanted, sought, and competed for Comintern approval.In no case did the American Communist party
offer significant resistance to Comintern guidance.Those in the movement who seriously resisted Moscow’s guidance quickly
became ex-Communists.[1]

The
final stage of the American party’s willing subordination to Moscow came in 1928 and 1929.In 1928, at Comintern urging, the American
party expelled James Cannon, one of the movement’s leading figures, and all
those thought to be infected with Trotskyism.In the aftermath of Cannon’s expulsion, in 1929 Jay Lovestone, Benjamin
Gitlow and Bertram Wolfe led the party’s dominant faction that controlled 95 of
104 delegates to the party’s 1929 convention.But Lovestone had been associated with Nikolai Bukharin and, despite
Lovestone hastily disavowing Bukharin when it was clear he was on the way out
in Moscow,
Comintern intervened to destroy Lovestone and his associates.Joseph Stalin himself presided over a
Comintern review of the leadership of the American party.When Gitlow told the Comintern reviewing
committee that his faction was the majority of the American party, Stalin’s
contemptuously dismissed the claim:

You declare you have a
certain majority in the American Communist Party and that you will retain that
majority under all circumstances. This is untrue, comrades of the American
delegation, absolutely untrue. You had a majority because the American
Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the
Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as the
friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American
Communist Party. But what will happen if the American workers learn that you
intend to break the unity of the ranks of the Comintern and are thinking of
conducting a fight against its executive bodies -- that is the question, dear
comrades? Do you think that the American workers will follow your lead against
the Comintern, that they will prefer the interests of your factional group to
the interests of the Comintern? There have been numerous cases in the history
of the Comintern when its most popular leaders, who had greater authority than
you, found themselves isolated as soon as they raised the banner against the
Comintern. Do you think you will fare better than these leaders? A poor hope,
comrades! At present you still have a formal majority. But tomorrow you will
have no majority and you will find yourselves completely isolated if you
attempt to start a fight against the decisions of the Presidium of the
Executive Committee of the Comintern.[2]

Stalin was right.Once American
Communists heard that Lovestone, Gitlow, and Wolfe had lost Moscow’s mandate, the Lovestoneist majority
vanished, the three were expelled, and only few hundred loyalists followed them
out of the party.Factionalism inside
the American party ended, and the thoroughly Stalinized party readily accepted
a leadership slate selected by the Comintern, one that after a period of
transition solidified in 1931 behind General Secretary Earl Browder.

In
the 1930s the Great Depression caused a segment of Americans to question the
adequacy and justice of the capitalist economic system, and the rise of Fascism
and Nazism also called into question the will of the Western democracies to
resist Fascist aggression.In the
circumstances, the CPUSA grew rapidly, particularly after 1936 when its
“Popular Front” stance allowed Communists to adopt patriotic rhetoric and use
antifascism as a platform for alliances with the broad coalition supporting
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program.CPUSA reached a peak membership registration
of 66,000 in January 1939, established a strong presence in the new trade union
federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), won prestige in
intellectual circles, and achieved modest but significant influence in
mainstream politics.

With
the CPUSA under Browder’s steady leadership, Comintern reduced its
micro-management.Moscow continued to review CPUSA decisions
and leadership slates, making changes when it wished.In 1936, for example, it instructed the CPUSA
to drop two persons from its proposed slate of Political Bureau members
entirely and vetoed the promotion of another from candidate to full member.[3]Overall, however, Comintern afforded Browder
and the CPUSA more initiative and latitude than in the 1920s.For example, Communist entry into the then
newly organized CIO was a CPUSA initiative.The Comintern had reservations, but after a persuasive CPUSA defense of
the plan, Comintern allowed it to go forward.[4]The German Cominternist Gerhart Eisler, the
last Comintern representative with plenipotentiary authority, left the U.S. in 1936.[5]Communications between the CPUSA and
Comintern, however, remained close.In
addition to a constant flow of telegraphic cables and postal letters, all
through the 1930s CPUSA sent a stream of American Communists to Moscow: official party “representatives” to the Comintern,
“referents” who served apprenticeships with sections of the Comintern, cadre
attending training sessions at the InternationalLeninSchool
and delegations of party activists attending Comintern-related
conferences.High-level CPUSA officials
also delivered lengthy written reports and were examined in person by the
Comintern’s Anglo-American Secretariat.

Loyalty to the “Great Land of Socialism”
continued to be a core value of American Communists.In the mid-30s new members of the CPUSA
recited a pledge to “defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious Socialism”
and to bring about “the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.”[6]The party’s 1935 manual of organization
stated that the CPUSA’s goal was “the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism ...
the establishment of a Socialist Soviet Republic in the United States” and
declared “the Soviet Union is the only fatherland of workers all over the
world” and “therefore, the workers all over the world must help the Soviet
Union in building socialism and must defend it with all their power”[7]And, while the Popular Front policies of 1936
and thereafter changed the tone of party rhetoric, the substance remained the
same.Party conferences mixed with
American flags with traditional red banners and portraits of Washington,
Jefferson and Lincoln hung beside those of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.Browder announced that the American
Declaration of Independence should be understood as a foreshadowing of Marx’s
Communist Manifesto, and had the patriotic “Yankee Doodle” played at party
conventions.Party organizers stopped
dressing in Bolshevik black leather and adapted American folk music and country
music as the musical format of agitational songs.“Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism”
became the quintessential party slogan of the Popular Front.Attractive to potential recruits and
garnering considerable and often approving attention from the mainstream media,
the slogan encapsulated the party’s public embrace of American values and the
political mainstream.Its history,
however, also demonstrates the limits and shallowness of the CPUSA’s commitment
to those values.Moscow thought American flags at a party
convention and pro-union lyrics set to banjo music were acceptable ways to
promote the Popular Front.“Communism is
Twentieth Century Americanism,” however, went too far with its implication that
Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism should be understood as an expression of American
political traditions.In early 1938 the
Comintern secretly ordered the CPUSA to drop the slogan, and it did so without
hesitation.[8]

Browder
and other party leaders and well as most rank-and-file members accepted the
Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 Pact without hesitation.Comintern did find it necessary to fine-tune
the CPUSA’s stance.Immediately after
the Pact, Georgi Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern, sent a ciphered message to
Browder explaining that the CPUSA’s line supporting the Pact was not fully
correct because while it broke with President Roosevelt’s policy of supporting
Britain and France in their resistance to Nazi aggression, it failed to take
the additional step of breaking with FDR’s domestic policies as well.Browder and the CPUSA immediately made the
required changes in its policies, and in 1940 the CPUSA did it best to prevent
FDR’s reelection to the presidency.[9]And in 1940 young organizers marked for
future party leadership heard senior leaders lecture:

The single country where the
dictatorship of the proletariat has triumphed represents a wedge driven into
world capitalism by the world proletariat.The USSR
is the stronghold of the world proletariat; it cannot be looked on as merely a
nation or a country; it is the most advanced position of the world proletariat
in the struggle for a socialist world.When the Red Army marches, it is the international proletariat marching
to extend its sphere of operations in the struggle against world imperialism.In the period of capitalist superiority in
strength, the Party splits world imperialism by taking advantage of its
inherent contradictions; it also builds up the strength of the USSR to provide
the world working class with greater might.Stalin, the great genius of socialism, stands like a colossus of steel
as the leader of the world proletariat.[10]

While loyalty to Soviet leadership was by this point a
deeply ingrained part of the world-view of American Communists, World War II,
nonetheless, reduced the direct organization ties of CPUSA to Comintern as well
as drastically reducing the volume of communications.Postal communications became less reliable
and was often delayed and subject to government inspection.International cable traffic was routinely
reviewed by war-time security officials.Travel to the USSR
became increasingly difficult and earlier heavy flow of American Communists to
and from Moscow
ended.In 1940 the U.S. Congress passed
and President Roosevelt signed into law the Voorhis Act that imposed regulatory
requirement on domestic American organizations with foreign government ties, and
to avoid possible Voorhis Act coverage, in November 1940, CPUSA (with Comintern
permission) severed its official membership in the Communist International, and
the last officially designated CPUSA representative in Moscow left in 1941.[11]And, of course, the Comintern itself
dissolved in 1943.

The “Mental Comintern”

The CPUSA’s loyalty to Moscow was not reduced by the reduced
communications and loss of direct organizational ties.Inevitably, however, the CPUSA’s
understanding of what Moscow
did or did not want became more indirect and based on judgments about the
direction of Soviet policy rather than on direct communications.Joseph Starobin, a senior CPUSA official in
the late 1940s and early 1950s, later wrote that although the physical
Comintern had disappeared, American Communists:

lived in what can only be
called “a mental Comintern,” imagining themselves part of something which did
not exist.Seen in the best light, they
were a species of self-proclaimed guerrillas, operating in what they believed
to be a world battle, but having no significant contact with any “main force”
and without a perception of the battle plan.They resorted essentially to zodiac signs for guidance.Because they dared not analyze Soviet aims in
terms of the hard realities of power, they could not appraise Soviet policy
either pragmatically or cynically. . . .The American Communists not only were viewed by others as expendable,
but they also expended themselves -- in a noble or pathetic fashion, depending
on one’s point of view.Their
international commitment was thus a species of drug, contracting the mind as it
expanded the illusions of the mind.[12]

Party leaders
loyally sought to do what Moscow wanted, but they could no longer rely an a
constant flow of cables, direct conversations with Comintern officials, and
information picked up by American cadre visiting Moscow to tell them what
Moscow really wanted.Instead, like
later Cold War media, academic, and government experts that came to be called
of “Kremlinologists,” American Communists tried to “read between the lines” of
stories in the Soviet press and intensely parsed the speeches of Soviet
officials to discern what Stalin really wanted.And, similarly to later “Kremlinologists,” while they often got it
right, sometimes they were only half-right and sometimes disastrously
wrong.On occasion in the 1920s and
1930s Comintern communications with the CPUSA had been blunt and even harsh,
but it had been clear about what Moscow
wanted.Communications in the “mental
Comintern,” however, was often distorted.The first to suffer from misreading the signals was Earl Browder.

Browder’s Teheran Doctrine and the Duclos Article

In November 1943, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister
Churchill, and Marshall Stalin met in Teheran (spelled Tehran
today), Iran
in the first of the great three power allied meetings to map out joint strategy
for the defeat of Nazi Germany.They
reached agreement on all the immediate major issues and issued a statement
affirming three power unity not only about immediate war issues but suggesting
in vague, general terms agreement about post-war goals.

As head of the
CPUSA, Earl Browder considered himself to be the leading Marxist-Leninist
scientist in North America.He had been the object of a minor personality
cult, regarded himself as America’s
Stalin, and possessed a measure of Stalin’s confidence in his own
judgment.To Browder Teheran signaled
“the greatest, most important turning point in all history.”The ruling classes on the U.S. and Britain
through their alliance with the Soviet Union had, Browder believed, put aside
efforts to destroy communism’s motherland and accepted the Soviet
Union as a partner in a new postwar world.For its part, the Soviet
Union had dissolved the Comintern in 1943 and no longer urged its
allies in the West to foment revolution.Teheran signaled, Browder said, that “capitalism and socialism had begun
to find the way to peaceful co-existence and collaboration in the same world”
and the duty of American Communists was “to work for such policies within the
country that will lead toward, and give realistic promise of, the continuation
of national unity into the post-war period for a long term of years.”Acknowledging that “the American people are
so ill-prepared, subjectively, for any deep-going change in the direction of
socialism” and in order to sustain national unity and block the attempts of
reactionaries to destroy peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union, Browder
pledged that the CPUSA “will not raise the issue of socialism in such a form
and manner as to endanger of weaken that national unity.”Instead, Browder said, “the policy for
Marxists in the United States is to face with all its consequences the
perspective of a capitalist post-war reconstruction in the United States” adopt
“a perspective in the immediate post-war period of expanded production and
employment and the strengthening of democracy within the framework of the
present system -- and not a perspective of the transition to socialism.”Browder added that Communists were “ready to
cooperate in making this capitalism work effectively.”[13]Browder extended this analysis to liberated
Europe as well, writing: “Europe west of the Soviet Union
probably will be reconstructed on a bourgeois-democratic, non-fascist
capitalist basis, not upon a Soviet basis.”[14]

Browder proclaimed what he called the “Teheran
Doctrine” embodying this judgment and proceeded to remodel the CPUSA to deal
with the new era.Most importantly
Browder declared that in the new era there was no political room for an
independent Communist Party in America.Instead, Communists would dissolve the CPUSA
and reorganize as a ideological advocacy group and take a place as a integral
part of the broad New Deal coalition headed by the Democratic Party.The Popular Front of the 1930s was
transformed from a tactical alliance to a permanent institutional strategy
integrating Communists into mainstream politics.[15]

Browder’s domination of the CPUSA was such that most
American Communists accepted the new line without demurrer.However, a few veteran leaders were
discreetly upset with the sweeping and unorthodox nature of Browder’s analysis.Within the confines of the CPUSA’s top
leadership William Z. Foster criticized Browder’s plans.Although a leading figure in CPUSA since the
early 1920s, he had clashed with Browder over the years and was by this time
isolated and no longer commanded a party faction.Browder, supported by the rest of the party
leadership, brushed aside Foster’s criticism but did agree to forward it to Moscow.

The Comintern no longer existed in 1944, but there
were remnants of Comintern.Georgi
Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern from 1935 until its dissolution, was still in Moscow and headed
Institute 205, a secret body that housed the remnant of the Comintern’s central
staff.(Eventually, most of Institute
205 was merged into the International Department of the CPSU.)Although the CPUSA had officially
disaffiliated from the Comintern in 1940 and the Comintern had officially
dissolved in 1943, checking with Moscow
was a fixed American party habit.Browder early in 1944 forwarded Foster’s critique to Dimitrov as a cable
via Soviet intelligence channels but also sent his own report explaining his
Teheran Doctrine and party reorganization plans via Soviet diplomatic
channels.In March Dimitrov sent a memo
to Molotov about the situation and cabled Browder with a reply:

Received Foster’s telegram.
Please report which leading party comrades support his views. I am somewhat
disturbed by the new theoretical, political and tactical positions you are
developing.Are you not going too far in
adapting to the altered international situation, even to the point denying the
theory and practice of class struggle and the necessity for the working class
to have its own political party?Please
reconsider all this and report your thoughts.Confirm receipt of this message.[16]

Browder, however, did not reconsider.He was confident he knew better than Dimitrov
where history and Joseph Stalin were going.Meanwhile, he misled his American comrades, assuring them that his
reforms had Moscow’s
approval.Having no competing sources
of information and, consequently, believing that Moscow had approved Browder’s reforms, Foster
backed down.In May 1944 a special
CPUSA national convention, with Foster presiding, unanimously voted to dissolve
the Communist Party, USA
and reorganize as the Communist Political Association.Even earlier, at Browder’s direction, the
Young Communist League had dissolved and reformed as the American Youth for
Democracy.The AYD presented itself as a
broad liberal-left organization of progressive youth, and its program did not
explicitly advocate Marxism-Leninism or even socialism.

While the war consumed almost all Soviet attention in
1944, nonetheless Moscow
noticed Browder’s decision to proceed despite Dimitrov’s warning and was not
pleased.In the fall of 1944 someone
commissioned a critiques of Browder’s reforms that appeared in January 1945
issue of the Bulletin of the Information Bureau of the CC RCP(b): Issues of
Foreign Policy, a secret Soviet Communist Party journal that circulated
among leading officials.The unsigned
article harshly denounced Browder’s Teheran Doctrine and his reforms of the
CPUSA, stating flately that Browder’s views were “erroneous conclusions in no
wise flowing from a Marxist analysis of the situation” and that his “notorious
revision of Marxism” had led to the “liquidation of the independent political
party of the working class.”The essay
denied that the wartime Soviet-American agreements could be interpreted to lay
the foundation for “a political platform of class peace in the postwar era” or
that there was “the possibility of the suppression of the class struggle in the
postwar period.”Instead, the article
said the Teheran agreement of the Soviet Union with Britain
and the United States
was only “a document of a diplomatic character.”Exactly who authorized or wrote the essay is
not clear, possibly Dimitrov who did not leave for Bulgaria until the fall of
1945.In any event, appearing as in did
in an authoritative CPSU ideological journal, it signaled profound Soviet
dissatisfaction with Browder’s ideas.Based on past loyalty to the Soviet cause, the Soviets had every reason
to be confident that once American Communists learned of Moscow’s displeasure, the problem would be
solved.But how to get the message to
American Communists?The Bulletin of
the Information Bureau was secret and American Communists had no access to
it.The alternative of publishing in an
open Soviet journal would certainly bring the matter to the attention of the
CPUSA, but this method would risk the article being interpreted as a diplomatic
signal that might upset official Soviet-American diplomatic relations, and the
latter were already growing delicate in 1945.With no Comintern in existence, a less direct mechanism was needed.The ad hoc solution was to translate
the article into French, give it to Jacques Duclos, a senior official of the
Communist Party of France.Duclos added
a few opening and closing paragraphs explaining (unconvincingly) why he, a
French party officer, was rendering judgment on the reform program of the
American party.The article was
published with Duclos listed as the sole author in the April 1945 issue of Les
Cahiers du Communisme, a French party journal that appeared publicly and to
which Americans had easy access, and by May copies and translations of Duclos’s
article were circulating in the U.S.[17]

The result was consternation in the American Communist
movement.The Duclos article was
immediately recognized not as the singular opinion of a French party official
but as Moscow’s
condemnations ofBrowder’s reforms. The
physical Comintern was dead, but the “mental Comintern” lived.Earl Browder had been the supreme leader of
the American Communist movement since the early 1930s.Virtually every major and many minor official
in the party owed his or her position to Browder’s approval and in many cases
had been personally picked by him for promotion and advancement.Most rank-and-file members had joined the
party subsequent to his taking the leadership and had no memory of any party
leader prior to Browder.None of this
counted when Moscow,
even by the indirect means of an article in a French Communist journal by a
French party leader most had never heard of, indicated its disapproval.In June the Communist Political Association
stripped Browder of his authority and in July 1945 an emergency convention
dissolved the CPA and reconstituted the Communist Party, USA.The CPUSA expelled Browder in 1946 and
denounced its former leader as “an unreconstructed revisionist ... a
social-imperialist ... an enemy of the working class ... a renegade ... an
apologist for American imperialism.”[18]

The Mental Comintern and the Failed Gamble of the 1948
Election

The CPUSA emerged from World War II with significant
institutional strength.Its membership
was around 60,000, close to its pre-war peak, and it maintained considerable
institutional strength in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the
second largest of America’s
two trade union federations.While the
Nazi-Soviet Pact had damaged it Popular Front relationship with liberals, much
of that harm had been repaired in the period after June 1941 when Communist
threw themselves whole-heartedly behind President Roosevelt’s war
policies.Communists had achieved a
significant role as part of the New Deal political coalition’s left-wing and
were influential in mainstream politics in the states of New
York, California, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington.

The revived CPUSA however, faced a major political
dilemma.The Duclos article had told
American Communists what not to do: they were not to give up their independence
by integrating into mainstream liberalism and they were not to assume that the
postwar world would see a continuation of the wartime alliance.It was also unquestioned that the CPUSA would
defend the interests of the Soviet Union in
the postwar era.As American-Soviet
tension began to develop in 1946, President Truman began to position the United States
for what would become the Cold War.Instinctively, the CPUSA opposed Truman’s policies and had no doubts
that Moscow
wanted American Communists to oppose Truman.But what was unclear was how the CPUSA should oppose
Truman.

There were two paths.The first, and more cautious, was to oppose Truman and his policies from
within the Democratic Party.Such a path
had some hope for success.Truman’s
leadership seemed pedestrian after the charismatic FDR, and the demobilization
in 1946 had produced a great deal of confusion, waste, and resentment.Republicans won control of the Congress in
the 1946 elections, and the trade union movement was feuding with the Truman
administration’s attempts to discourage postwar strikes that threatened the
economic transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy.Truman’s popularity sank so low in 1947 that
Republicans were confident of defeating him in 1948.If Communists and their allies stayed within
the Democratic Party they could appeal to Democrats either disenchanted with
Truman’s policies or concerned that the President was unelectable.And they had potentially viable replacement
for Truman as the Democratic candidate in 1948: Henry Wallace, who had served
FDR as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice-President, and Secretary of Commerce
before being fired by Truman for opposing the new President’s emerging Cold War
policies.Wallace could potentially
challenge Truman in Democratic primaries and caucuses and possibly wrest the
1948 nomination from Truman.

The barriers to success, however, were large.The majority of Democratic Party national
convention delegates were not chosen in primaries but by party caucuses and
conventions controlled by party professionals unlikely to support a naive
idealist like Henry Wallace.And if
Truman won the nomination from the Democratic National Convention in 1948, as
was likely, then Communists and their Popular Front liberal allies would face a
frustrating situation.The American
electoral system was such that if they waited until after the Democratic
nomination was decided in the summer of 1948, there was as a practical matter
no effective way to offer an alternative to Truman or the Republican nominee in
the fall election.Essentially, if
Communists and their allies stayed in the Democratic Party and failed to
prevail at the Democratic National Convention, the most they could do would be
to sit out the fall election and wait until 1950.However, this result also pointed to the
safety of this path; even if Communists and their allies were defeated at the
1948 Democratic convention, they would survive to fight another day with their
positions in the broad New Deal coalition and the labor movement intact.

The second path was bolder and had greater risk: to
pull out of the Democratic Party, create a new third party that could offer an
alternative to both Republican conservatism and Truman’s combination of
moderate liberalism and an increasingly anti-Soviet foreign policy.Although victory for a third party was
unlikely, even a respectable third place would so divide the New Deal voting
base that Truman would be defeated and Democrats in 1950 would seek to
accommodate progressives by dropping Truman’s Cold War policies for something
more accommodating to Soviet needs.And,
if Truman’s popularity continued to drop in 1948 and it had in 1947, there was
even a possibility that Democrats would fall into third place and the new party
with Communists in its leadership would become the primary political vehicle
for New Deal voters.

This path, however, also had very grave risks.Once Communists and their Popular Front
allies pulled out of the Democratic Party, they were exposed, and if Truman won
reelection, their third party might be marginalized and their opportunity to
get back into the Democratic party would be limited.Further, to abandon the Democratic Party
would put at risk the Communist party’s position in the CIO.Despite feuding with the Truman White House
over various matters, most CIO leaders regarded the labor movement’s protection
under federal labor regulations as tied to the fate of the Democratic
Party.Many CIO leaders would oppose any
third parity that threatened liberal and labor unity in 1948.

Which path to take?There was no longer a Comintern to consult in 1946.And with Dimitrov’s departure for Bulgaria, there was no readily identifiable
authoritative figure in Moscow
for the CPUSA to consult.Temporarily
the CPUSA put off a decision by pursuing both paths.Communists proceeded on two parallel tracks
in 1946 and early 1947, supporting both Popular Front liberal allies who wanted
to fight Truman within the Democratic Party and those who wanted to break with
the Democratic Party and create a “pure” and uncompromised progressive
party.In part this decision to pursue
both paths was simply a waiting to see if the political situation changed
sufficiently to make the preferred path clear.In large part, however, it was also waiting for Moscow to signal what path was
preferred.But the political situation
did not change sufficiently to indicate what was the most likely path to
success, and Moscow
sent no signals that the CPUSA could read.

The CPUSA was desperate for detailed discussions with
the Soviets but little opportunity existed. Soviet diplomats were not
authorized to discuss domestic American politics with the CPUSA.CPUSA leaders had been in contact with Soviet
intelligence officers.But Soviet
intelligence in the wake of the late 1945 defections of Elizabeth Bentley and
Igor Gouzenko had temporary withdrawn most of its field officers from North America and, in any event, the CPUSA leader who had
worked most closely with Soviet intelligence had been the now disgraced Earl
Browder.And travel to Moscow by Americans was severely restricted
by Soviet policy and lingering war time disruptions in international travel.

The first opportunity for a senior American Communist
to talk frankly with Soviet officials came in March 1947 when Moscow
hosted a conference of the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States.The Soviets allowed a sizable delegation of
American journalists to cover the conference, including Morris Childs, chief
editor of the CPUSA’s Daily Worker.Childs, however, was not primarily a journalist.He was a senior CPUSA official who had served
in numerous responsible party posts.

Once in Moscow
he sought out staff officials of the International Department of the CPSU and
briefed them on all aspects of the CPUSA’s activities and internal
situation.The memos showed several
things.One was that the official who met
with Childs and wrote the memoranda, Boris Vronsky, wrote in a way that suggested
only limited prior knowledge of the CPUSA’s recent internal situation.A second aspect was that Vronsky appeared to
have no guidance about how to respond to Childs urgent request for Soviet
advice on several matters, the most important of which was how to approach the
1948 American presidential election, specifically: “What is the best use to
which the growing progressive movement can be put in the upcoming U.S.
presidential campaign?” and “What is [our] opinion on the creation of a third
party if Wallace, Pepper, Murray and others refuse to participate in this at
the present time?”[19]

In response to Vronsky’s memo, Alexander Panyushkin, a
senior CPSU central committee advisor (to become Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. in October 1947), observed, “it seems to us
that in the U.S.
the conditions are not yet in place to create such a party at the present
time.”Panyushkin suggested that Childs
be cautioned, “the apparent task of the CPUSA at the present time is to
struggle for unity of action of all progressive forces and above all for unity
of action in the workers’ movement.And
resolving the problem of creating a third party depends on that.”[20]

Childs had asked to meet with a senior Soviet official
so that he could carry back an authoritative answer to the CPUSA.He was allowed to meet with Solomon Lozovsky,
once a deputy foreign minister and former chief of the Profintern.While Lozovsky was known to the CPUSA from
his Profintern days, in 1947 his star was in decline and he was director of the
Soviet Information Bureau, an arm of the International Department.[21]Lozovsky conveyed to Childs the essence of
Panyushkin’s suggestion: the key to the decision over creating a third party
was achieving unity on the progressive left, and Lozovsky cautioned against
jeopardizing the CPUSA’s role in the CIO.Lozovsky also spoke approvingly of Yevgeni S. Varga’s book, Changes
in the Economics of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War, that
had appeared in 1946.Varga headed Moscow’s Institute
of World Economy and
World Politics and was a leading Soviet authority on economics and
ideology.In this book Varga argued
that, due to the destruction of European industry, for a time the chief source
of war, capitalist overproduction and competition for markets, was absent.America
would face overproduction but with Europe suffering from underproduction, the
obvious remedy was the export of American capital to Europe
to support the rebuilding of European industry.Varga also suggested that the economies of Eastern European nations
would remain capitalist in character and tied to Western European markets for a
lengthy period.[22]

Childs dutifully carried this cautious advice on a
third party back to his colleagues in the CPUSA leadership along with
Lozovsky’s recommendation of Varga’s writings when he returned from the foreign
ministers conference in mid-April.In
the short run, this advice did little to resolve the CPUSA’s dilemma.The Soviets had not rejected the bold third
party path, but they had warned that progressive unity should be maintained and
that the CPUSA should avoid severing ties with the CIO and its more cautious
liberal allies.But how could one be
sure that a third party would or would not break links with the CIO and liberal
allies before one actually founded the third party and the political dynamic
worked itself out?The American party
wanted clear guidance and got cautious ambiguity.So for the moment that CPUSA continued its
two-track policy of simultaneously working within the Democratic Party to mount
a challenge to Truman and also encouraging militants who were contemplating
creating a third party.

The cautious advise that Childs delivered, however,
was quickly undercut by events in the Soviet Union.Stalin was in the process of shifting his
foreign policy to a more aggressive Cold War path.Varga’s book, with a theme that appeared to
accept American economic predominance in Europe,
did not fit well with a more confrontational stance.In May 1947 Soviet leaders launched an
ideological attack on Varga for having failed to take a Stalinist position of
the world situation.The CPSU ordered
Varga’s institute merged into another Soviet agency and the once high-flying
Varga returned to his native Hungary
to a minor position in its new Communist regime.

The anti-Varga campaign had nothing to do with the
cautious advice that Childs had received, but in the absence of adequate
communications, many CPUSA leaders saw a connection.In their “mental Comintern” world, if Moscow
could signal its disapproval of Browderism via an article authored by a
Frenchman in a French journal, Varga’s fall must call into question the advice
that Childs had gotten from Lozovsky, who had spoken well of the disgraced
Varga.Varga’s fall along with
increasingly belligerent statements from Moscow
convinced CPUSA leaders that Morris Childs had talked to the wrong people in Moscow, gotten wrong advice, and had mislead the CPUSA on
what Moscow
wanted.He was ousted from the
editorship of the Daily Worker. But if Child’s report that Moscow counseled caution
had been wrong, exactly what was right was still unclear.A June meeting of the CPUSA’s leadership
continued the party’s simultaneous pursuit both paths to the 1948 election.

Then in September, 1947, Moscow organized the Communist Information
Bureau (Cominform).(And we today meet
on the 60th anniversary and in the same place as that conference.)Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief ideologist,
dominated the meeting and his speech gave the organization its policy
line.Zhdanov proclaimed:

the division of the political
forces operating in the international arena into two main camps -- the
imperialist and anti-democratic camp on the one hand and the anti-imperialist
and democratic camp on the other.The
main, leading force of the imperialist camp is the U.S.A....The anti-imperialist and anti-fascist forces
constitute the other camp.The U.S.S.R.
and the countries of the new democracy [Eastern Europe]
constitute the mainstay of that camp.[23]

This two camps thesis left little room for
accommodation and compromise.

Cominform was not a new Comintern.Comintern supervised Communist movements everywhere on the globe and its
mission was world revolution.Cominform
had a limited membership and a limited purpose.Only European Communist parties belonged, and not all of them.Essentially, the Cominform was an
anti-Marshall plan agency, a mechanism for Soviet coordination of assaults by European
Communist parties on Truman’s plan to use American financial aid in a
coordinated European economic recovery program.

But although the CPUSA was not a member of
Cominform, and no CPUSA representatives were even present at its founding, once
the news reached the U.S. of the formation of Cominform and Zhdanov’s harsh
assaults on American policies, CPUSA leaders ended their two-track policy
toward the 1948 election.In their eyes,
Cominform and Zhdanov’s
speech was the long awaited signal: no accommodation, no compromise, only bold
steps were acceptable.In the fall of
1947, the CPUSA moved swiftly to establish a third-party no matter what the
costs to its existing alliances.

Popular
Front allies of the CPUSA persuaded Henry Wallace to abandon the Democratic
Party and lead a third party, the Progressive Party, in the 1948 election.Communist activists in the CIO used all their
influence to get their unions to support Wallace’s Progressive Party and defied
the CIO’s national leadership decision to oppose the Progressive Party as a
threat to liberal unity.Popular Front
liberals and Democratic politicians and office holders allied with the CPUSA
were encouraged, cajoled, persuaded and in some cases ordered on threat of
political oblivion to break with the Democratic Party and join the new
Progressive Party.Every magazine,
newspaper, journal, front group, civil body, and organization where the CPUSA
had influence was mobilized for the Progressive Party campaign that ran not
only Wallace for the presidency but candidates for the U.S. Congress, state
governorships, and state legislatures as well.

The
results was disaster.Anti-Communist
liberals, already growing stronger as the Cold War grew more intense, used the
creation of the Progressive Party as an illustration of CPUSA manipulation and
stressed that any association with Communists was a threat to liberal unity and
a political liability.Many liberals who
had earlier been allied with Communists in the Democratic party refused to make
the jump to the Progressive Party and fled from association with what was
perceived by much of the American public as a Communist front.As the election approached in the fall of
1948 the Progressive Party, rather than being the broad progressive coalition
it was intended to be, was little more than Henry Wallace, Communists
pretending they were non-Communist progressives, a handful of Popular Front
liberals, and a few Communist-led CIO unions. Compounding the weakness of the
Progressive Party was the revival of President Truman’s popularity as his
forceful foreign policy and his criticism of Republican domestic policies
struck a chord with the public.

Truman
won with 24,045,052 votes, Thomas Dewey (Republican) was second with 21,896,927
votes, and Strom Thurmond of the States Rights party was third with 1,168,687
votes.Wallace came in fourth with
1,137,957 votes, 2.3% of the total.Results for congressional and state elections were even more
dismal.Only a single Progressive Party
nominee won election to Congress while the revived Democrats regained control
of both houses.

Earlier,
Communists and their Popular Front allies had been part of the broad New Deal
coalition.After 1948, the New Deal
coalition was dominated by Truman’s Cold War Democrats and anti-Communist
liberals.By leaving the Democratic
Party, Communists and their Popular Front allies had exposed, tainted, and
marginalized themselves.Even after the
collapse of the Progressive Party few were able to work they way back into
positions of influence in mainstream liberalism.

The
most damaging results for the CPUSA, however, was in the trade union
movement.Many union leaders and
activists had long mistrusted Communists, but had grudgingly tolerated their
presence.And CIO Communists in
positions of responsibility in a number of major unions had been able to lend
considerable institutional support to Communist causes.But Communist defiance of CIO political
decisions in 1948 enraged CIO leaders and ended that toleration.In 1949 and 1950 CIO organizers and staff
that were identified as Communists were fired and anti-Communist caucuses in
individual CIO unions drove most Communists from union offices.Those few unions that retained Communist
leaders were expelled from the CIO, and both the CIO and AFL sponsored
competing unions that sought to takeover their members.Within two years the once strong Communist
presence in the trade union movement was reduced to a weak remnant.

Since
the 1930s American Communists had built up a formidable array of institutions
and achieved a significant measure of influence in the labor movement and in
liberal-left political circles.In 1948
Communists gambled these assets on the Progressive Party and lost the
gamble.The 1948 Progressive Party
adventure broke the back of communism in America by destroying its political
position in the New Deal coalition and its institutional role in the trade
union movement.In the years that
followed American Communists suffered other defeats and setbacks.The U.S. government use of the
anti-sedition provisions of the Smith Act to prosecute CPUSA leaders, hostile
exposure of party activities by congressional investigations, and fierce public
anti-Communist sentiment delivered additional blows to the party.But the Progressive Party undertaking,
however, was the movement’s decisive defeat.What followed was a long dying.

The
Progressive Party disaster was not the result of the CPUSA blindly following
orders from Moscow.Moscow
issued no orders.Indeed, the only
guidance it offered via Lozovsky had been cautious and, looking back on it,
imminently sensible.But the CPUSA was
so concerned to do what Moscow
wanted, that it needed clarity and repeated assurances of what it was to
do.The one instance of sensible advice
delivered via Lozovsky was quickly lost in the clutter of American Communists
seeing signs and signals in Soviet actions where none existed.It is doubtful that anyone connected with the
creation of Cominform or that Andrei Zhdanov when preparing his speech thought
that their actions would be seen as signals of what path the CPUSA should take
toward the 1948 election.But American
Communists continued to live in a “mental Comintern.”They wanted to do what Moscow wanted, no more and no less.Indeed, they not only wanted to know, they
needed to know.The CPUSA’s only
mechanism for resolving major disputes and dilemmas was to have Moscow decide.The CPUSA needed to receive a signal to
resolve their indecision about 1948.Emotionally, Cominform and the Zhdanov
speech was a relief to CPUSA.Their
indecision was over, they believed that Moscow
had signaled what way to go, and the CPUSA marched into folly.

The
“mental Comintern” would in a similar fashion lead to additional missteps.In 1950, taking the Soviet
Union’ harsh anti-American rhetoric and its lurid depictions of
American sinking into a Fascist nightmare literally, a paranoid party
leadership dropped from membership several thousand supporters judged
insufficiently militant to withstand the expected Fascist crack down.In 1950-54, it also send hundreds of
experienced leaders and cadre into an underground existence to avoid arrest
when the American government openly revealed its Fascist character and
imprisoned all Communists and progressives.The CPUSA expected the cadre it send underground to emulate the German
Communist Party’s resistance to the Nazi regime.The underground exercise was not only
pointless (there was no Fascist crack down) but counterproductive because the
party badly needed those cadre to sustain its activities at a time when it was
under severe stress.(After Stalin’s
death, it became clear to the party that maintaining the underground cadre was
a colossal waste, and it was quietly abandoned.)

The
reaction of the CPUSA to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech on Stalin’s crimes
further illustrated the power of the “mental Comintern” and its negative
consequences.Stalin had been the
central figure of the mental world of most American Communists since the 1930s,
and Khrushchev’s speech exploded that world.Peggy Dennis, wife of Gene Dennis, CPUSA general secretary in 1956,
remembered that on reading the text “the last page crumpled in my fist, I lay
in the half darkness and I wept....For
Gene’s years in prison....For the years
of silence in which we had buried doubts and questions.For a thirty-year life’s commitment that lay
shattered.I lay sobbing low,
hiccoughing whimpers.”[24]Her reaction was typical. Party newspapers and journals, publications
that rarely printed internal debate, were for a time filled with angry,
outraged, tormented, pain-filled letters, editorials, and resolutions revealing
a membership in agony.

Khrushchev
disclosed only a portion of the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood that
resulted from Stalinism, and much of what he announced was already know in the
West.However, American Communists and
their sympathizers had not believed the tales of blood-soaked mass terror,
rigged trials, and lethal Gulag labor camps that had been told by
anti-Communists and carried by the mainstream American press.The CPUSA’s theoretical journal Political
Affairs editorialized on “the impact of the Khrushchev revelation,” “these
revelations” and “the shocking disclosures.” William Z. Foster, the party’s
chairman, referred to “the sweeping revelations of the Stalin cult of the
individual.” Max Weiss, a longtime leading party figure, said, “the disclosure
of the mistakes made under Stalin’s leadership came as a stunning surprise to
our Party leadership and membership,” and party chief Gene Dennis wrote, “the
facts disclosed about the errors of Stalin . . . are, of course, new to
us.”The historian Aileen Kraditor
observed that Dennis’s comment was “a literal lie but a deeper truth: the facts
were not new; their meaning was. Truth was not what fitted reality; it was what
[authoritative ideological leaders] . . . uttered. The source of a doctrine,
news item, or any other statement carried more weight than the content of it;
the feeling about the source preceded and determined the true believer’s
reaction.” In other words, Dennis, Foster and other American Communists who
inhabited the “mental Comintern” did not credit the evidence of Stalin’s crimes
until an authoritative Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, ruled that they were
crimes.In the mental world of American
Communists, Stalin’s mass murders were only visible only if Moscow could see them.It was as if American Communists wore special
glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw.Once Khrushchev gave Moscow’s
sanction to the charges against Stalinism, American Communists, in shock,
suddenly saw bodies littering the landscape.[25]For most American Communists, this was too
much.Their world was shattered and they
left.

The
CPUSA had emerged from World War II with about 60,000 members.As the Cold War gathered strength, as popular
American anticommunism grew stronger, as government harassment increased, and
after the debacle of the 1948 election and ejection from the CIO, the party
steadily shed member.By 1956 it’s
membership was about 12,000.Then came
Khrushchev’s speech, the Hungarian revolt and the party’s internal agony.In the winter of 1957-58, the CPUSA
reregistered its members to get an accurate count of who had survived.The total was about three thousand; the
Communist party had lost over three-quarters of its members in two years.While government prosecution and harassment
had played a role, the most powerful blows that smashed the American Communist
movement were self-inflicted.

Many
of the devastating self-inflected wounds resulted from the “mental Comintern”
leading American Communists to misunderstand what Moscow wanted because they misread the
speeches and actions coming out of the Kremlin.It was not until the late 1950s that the CPUSA and the Soviets worked
out a more direct system of communications that ended what Joseph Starobin had
described as the CPUSA resorting to “zodiac signs for guidance” as to what
Moscow wanted.In 1958 Morris Childs,
restored to the leadership of the CPUSA, began two decades service liaison
between the CPUSA and Moscow.By that point, however, the American party
had been reduced to small and marginalized sect on the fringes of American
politics kept alive only by generous secret Soviet financial subsidies and the
residual support of a few thousand life-long loyalists.

One
odd note about the restoration of direct communications between the CPUSA and Moscow was that a silent
partner to the exchanges was the American Federal Bureau of
Investigations.Shortly after Childs
fell out of favor with the CPUSA leadership and was removed as Daily Worker
editor in mid-1947, he suffered a serious heart attack and dropped out of
active party work during a lengthy recovery.In 1951, while still recovering, the FBI approached him and his brother,
Jack, also a veteran CPUSA activist.Both agreed to cooperate with the FBI.Morris Childs reentered active CPUSA work in 1954.By that point the party was in rapid decline,
and party leaders needed all the veteran cadre they could mobilize and welcomed
him back.He soon became a confident of
Gus Hall, a hard-line Stalinist who emerged out of the party’s
near-disintegration in 1956-58 as its dominant figure.Hall took over formal leadership of the CPUSA
in 1959, pushing aside Gene Dennis, the party’s long-time leader, who was dying
of cancer.Hall dominated the party
until his death in 2000 at the age of ninety.

With
Hall’s backing, Childs traveled back and forth to Moscow for two decades, making fifty-two
trips carrying Soviet financial subsidies to the CPUSA, consulting with Soviet
leaders, and transmitting information and instructions to the American party,
all the while also reporting to the FBI.[26]

[1]. On the early years of the American party and its
relationship to the Comintern, see: Theodore Draper, The Roots of American
Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957); Theodore Draper, American
Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Harvey Klehr
and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven
Itself (New York: Twayne, 1992); Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill
M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).For a view that
minimizes as well as justifies Comintern supervision of the American party,
see: Jacob A. Zumoff, “The Communist Party of the United
States and the Communist International, 1919–1929” (Ph.D.
diss., University
of London, 2003).

[2]. “First Speech Delivered in the Presidium of the
E.C.C.I. on the American Question, May 14, 1929,” in Joseph Stalin, Stalin’s
Speeches on the American Communist Party, Delivered in the American Commission
of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, May
6, 1929, and in the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist
International on the American Question, May 14th, 1929.., pamphlet ([New
York]: Central Committee, Communist Party, U. S. A., 1931).

[19]. B. Vronsky, “Conversations with CPUSA Politburo
Member Morris Childs”, undated but attached to a 10 April 1947 memo, Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) 17-128-1128.Translation into English in Klehr, Haynes,
and Anderson, The
Soviet World, 265–68.Claude
Pepper, a U.S. Senator (Democrat) from Florida, was a prominent critic of
President Truman’s Cold War policies, but he had no institutional ties to the
Popular Front left and little interest in a third party.Philip Murray, chief of the CIO as well as
president of the United Steel Workers of America, tolerated Communists in the
CIO (but not in his USWA) but was hostile to any threat to liberal unity in
1948.

[20]. Panyushkin to A. A. Zhadanov and A.A. Kuznetsov, 10
April 1947, RGASPI 17-128-1128.Reproduced in English translation in Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The
Soviet World, 270–71.

[21]. He was latter arrested and executed in Stalin’s
purge of Jewish “cosmopolitans.”

[22]. An account of Childs’ meeting with Lozovsky is in
Philip J. Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism (New York:
Horizon Press, 1975), 87–135.

[24]. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American
Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925–1975 (Westport, CT: L.
Hill, 1977), 225.

[25]. Communist Party of the USA, “The Communist Party
Convention,” Political Affairs 36 (April 1957): 3; William Z. Foster,
“Draper’s ‘Roots of American Communism,’” Political Affairs 36 (May
1957): 37; Eugene Dennis, “Questions and Answers on the XXth Congress, CPSU,” Political
Affairs 35 (April 1956): 24. These and additional similar quotations can be
found in Aileen S. Kraditor, “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the
American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930–1958 (New York: Greenwood Press,
1988), 85.